Senate Votes To Save Net Neutrality

The Senate voted on Wednesday to restore the FCC's rules on net neutrality, passing a bill which will probably die on the floor of the House, but may ignite a fierce debate among Democrats ahead of midterm elections.

Senate Democrats managed to force the Wednesday vote using a rare legislative tool called the "Congressional Review Act" (CRA) - which allows Congress, with a majority vote in each chamber along with the president's signature, to overturn recent policy changes.

Democrats argue that without the FCC's net neutrality rules, companies such as Comcast and Verizon will have free reign to discriminate against certain content, or allow superior access to partner websites and services. Under the old rules, internet service providers (ISPs) are required to treat all internet traffic equally.

In order to pass through the House, the bill would need 25 Republicans to support the Democratic effort in order to even bring it up for a vote.

Most Republicans have argued that the FCC's net neutrality rules are overkill and not required for broadband providers - urging Democrats to come to the table and negotiate a legislative solution to replace the FCC rules. The broadband industry is predictably very supportive of this effort.

Supporters of net neutrality, however, flatly reject the notion that the GOP-controlled Congress can come up with solutions which protect content as well as the FCC rules. The proposed GOP legislation, for example, would allow internet service providers (ISPs) to create "fast lanes" which would charge websites to provide faster speeds to end users.

Of course, as Recode pointed out last year, Obama's net neutrality rules were celebrated by websites and content providers who could be subjected to throttling by telecom and cable companies who own distribution networks.

Adopted in 2015 under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. government’s current approach to net neutrality subjects the likes of AT&T, Comcast, Charter and Verizon to utility-like regulation. That legal foundation prevents them from blocking or throttling web pages, while banning content-delivery deals known as paid prioritization. And it grants the FCC wide legal range to review virtually any online practice it deems harmful to consumers.

Such strong rules always have been popular in Silicon Valley, where startups in particular fear they could not compete without tough net neutrality safeguards. But they long have drawn sharp opposition from the telecom industry, which sued the FCC in 2015 in a bid to overturn them.

Before that case could come to its conclusion, however, Trump entered the White House, ushering in a new era of Republican control at the nation’s telecom agency. And Pai, a fervent opponent of utility-like regulation of net neutrality, set about undoing the Obama-era rules almost as soon as he took over the FCC. -Recode

In addition to the Senate bill, there is a separate battle in court to fight the FCC's repeal - however that is likely to drag on for months.

As a small web business owner, I hope Net Neutrality dies. Its a propaganda word to get you to sign on to the idea that the FCC should run the Internet, because we all know how fair they are going to be the next time your less favored party is in power.

Also, if you are a small publisher, this is just like renting an apartment. If you are only willing to pay $3 a month for a crappy one-click-install Wordpress site hosted on Bluehost, you will get the corresponding bandwidth (enough to send text and optimized images, not enough to do video). If you pay the princely sum of perhaps $20 a month with a good host, they will pool the extra bucks together from the thousands of customers to pay for the needed bandwidth to self-host a site that has a moderate amount of traffic.

Currently it costs me a few hundred to provide fast, reliable hosting for software that serves a user base in the mid thousands, and I price my products accordingly. It comes out to pennies per end user.

If you had the expectation that you should be able to pay zero to host hours/days of video for millions of people, and for it to be just as fast as the people paying thousands to millions to do the same, get real.

This has always been about charging a premium to large-bandwidth companies that want to stream large amounts of HD video, i.e. Netflix and Youtube. I just put the ZH homepage into my dev console, and it came out as 575 kB total. That's tiny in modern bandwidth terms.

Give me some examples of where this was commonplace with any of these companies before NN, and also demonstrate that they maintained their position in the market for 10 years or more. Or even 5 years. This policy didn't start until recently.

Didn't you read the article? If passed, "Net Neutrality" will make it illegal for the people paying thousands to millions to do so. I don't understand how that can work out in real life though, because the cost you pay is to your host server. As you point out however, some low end host like BlueHost will never be able to afford the costly upgrades to equal the bandwidth of corporations like Google's server farms. Are they going to force Google, Amazon, et. al., to the limit their bandwidth to that of the slowest server on the Internet, hahaha. Back to 9600 Baud. :))

When the content is censored at the source by FaceBerg, Jewgle, JewFlix, Imajew Prime, etc, then it's irrelevant what the telecom and cable companies do after that. Of course, the real purpose of so-called "Net Neutrality" is to subsidize the bandwidth of FaceBerg, Jewgle, JewFlix, Imajew Prime, etc so they can more profitably pump their propaganda sewage into your home and workplace.

The cable and telecom companies are boring monopolies and the one good thing about boring monopolies is, they are pretty incompetent at managing complex processes like censorship or propaganda manufacturing. So it's hard for me to get worked up about the possibility that they might censor me. Plus its a lot harder to censor content at the delivery point than it is at the production point, and the cable and telecom companies are at the delivery point. Incompetence + high degree of difficulty = something I don't have to worry about.

This is why the kikes are being so stubborn about getting "Net Neutrality" back in running condition. Remember, there is nothing worse than a filthy lying kike!

I know there is a /s implied above, but, this is all about Hollywood and other large scale content providers trying to get a free ride from the broadband providers

LARGE content providers are pulling out all the stops to make sure 'Net Neutrality" aka Net Free Ride stays in place. Hence the Democrats and the looney left fight for it. The cute name (NN) just gets the useful idiots all whipped up.

As an FYI, I've been in the meetings with the content providers discussing this...It gives them night tremors

This is bullshit. The consumers are paying their broadband suppliers for access. If consumers are taking advantage of the broadband providers by using more bandwidth than they pay for, then the broadband providers need to charge these subscribers more.

Different. Twitter may ban a user. Verizon/Comcast will slow down entire sites they don't like and/or that don't pay up. So you go to ZH for example, and it will load very slowly. Presumably you can still get to it, but it becomes a severe annoyance and readers start dropping off. It blows my mind that anyone who is not a Verizon or Comcast CEO thinks it is a good idea to allow these monopolist entities to make those kinds of calls. Of course they will throttle back sites like ZH and other outside the mainstream sites.

Lets imagine that the new "fast lane" policy is that you pay $5/TB for bandwidth, but during peak times or for more than 5 TB per day, you must pay $20 per TB.

A site like ZH is 5-600kB per page. Youtube delivers tens to hundreds of megabytes per page (video), and Netflix delivers multi-GB 4K video. Using either model, who is more likely to take it on the chin without NN?

With NN, everyone has to pay the same, so in this case the price gets set at $10/TB to cover the people who would have paid $20. Now who wins?

People have short memories. Well, I suppose this one is a while back, but who here remembers AOL? At first that service ws a straight-up walled garden, you surfed inside of their space, and that was it. A while later MSN came out (then one after the other), and petty quickly you found out that there was a whole other Internet outside of AOL, and at this point AOL has next to no significance.

This is also how it works with the standard arguments around Net Neutrality. If Comcast really tried to do what Facebook is doing, there will be a corresponding uproar, and it would be expressed with people taking their dollars and giving them to whoever is going to give them the freedom they are seeking.

Also, who has noticed how the argument is that they *might* do something? Pre-NN, does anyone remember a company getting away with a walled garden Internet perpetually? Like I said, AOL tanked on that model.

This is also how it works with the standard arguments around Net Neutrality. If Comcast really tried to do what Facebook is doing, there will be a corresponding uproar, and it would be expressed with people taking their dollars and giving them to whoever is going to give them the freedom they are seeking.

If I could choose between three or four players, then, sure let the market figure itself out. In many/most places there is only one option in town to deliver high speed. I do not want some suit & tie dictating what is or is not available.

Again, NN was brought in only a few years ago. Who was doing this a few years ago when the regs weren't here, and how many got away with it at a substantial scale in perpetuity?

Further, if there is only one option in town, would you pay an additional $10 per month for a second? I'm thinking back to when I lived in Iowa, and about a group of farmers that went in together on some equipment to set up a network of wireless antennae on silos to get around an existing company. There are solutions other than hoping the FCC will be favorable toward you, and not toward the same suit&tie who has the time and money to lobby.